The knock ca early.
Gina was up first. She was always up first — she moved through mornings the way so people moved through crowds, like she’d worked out the route in advance. Yuto heard the knock and heard her cross the floor and was still sitting up and locating his hair with one hand when the door opened.
Then a voice ca through it.
"Well."
A pause.
"Don’t you look lovely this morning."
Yuto was on his feet before that sentence finished.
He ca out to find Gina in the doorway in her sleep clothes, arms crossed over herself, and a man filling the fra behind her like he owned it.
Teki Masaru.
He was dressed the way he always was, which was expensively and with full awareness of this. He was smiling at Gina with the particular smile of soone who had spent a long ti learning what he could get away with and had never once been corrected.
Gina followed his gaze down and pulled her robe tighter across her chest.
"Oh, you don’t have to do that," Teki said, pleasantly. He waved a hand. "Not on my account."
Yuto stepped between them.
Teki’s smile didn’t go anywhere. It just adjusted — rearranged itself into the expression of a man who has found sothing mildly inconvenient in his path and is deciding whether it’s worth acknowledging.
He sniffed.
"Slls like failure in here," he said, with a small wince. Like he’d walked into sothing unpleasant.
"What do you want," Yuto said.
Not a question. Just words put in that order.
Teki looked him over slowly. Top to bottom. He took his ti with it. "I genuinely want to understand," he said, "what Gina is doing here. In this." He glanced past Yuto at the room, briefly, the way you glance at sothing that doesn’t quite register as real. "With you." Back to Yuto. "You’re a nothing. You failed. Everyone knows. There’s no reading of this situation that makes sense."
Sothing moved in Yuto’s chest. Hot and specific.
"Say that again," he said.
Teki blinked. Then he yawned — a real one, jaw dropping, completely unhurried, and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth after. "I’m genuinely not in the mood today," he said. "That’s not what I ca for."
He looked past Yuto’s shoulder at Gina.
His voice went almost soft. The tone of soone who thinks they’re being kind. "I ca to say good morning. And to remind you —" he held her gaze, patient, warm, unbearable, "— that the offer still stands. You don’t have to stay here. This house. This..." another glance at Yuto, quick and dismissive, "...situation. You could have a real life, Gina. A comfortable one."
A beat.
"Think about it."
He turned to leave.
The hot thing in Yuto’s chest had beco a problem. He took half a step forward and Gina’s hand closed around his arm from behind.
"Don’t."
Firm. Specific. The grip of soone who has thought about this.
He stopped.
"His words don’t matter," she said. Quieter now, just for him. "You’ve awakened, Yuto. You’re an Ethereal. Give it ti."
She said it the way she said things that weren’t opinions. Just facts she’d already decided on.
He looked at her. Her eyes were steady and slightly fierce, the way they got when she was standing in front of sothing she wasn’t going to let past.
He exhaled.
Then he reached over and ruffled her hair. She accepted this with the resigned patience of soone who had been through it enough tis to know there was no stopping it, but the smile ca anyway, imdiate and real, and she grabbed his wrist and turned toward the kitchen.
"Breakfast," she announced, pulling. "Co on."
He let himself be dragged.
She talked the whole way there — eggs, whether they had enough, what she was going to do about it if they didn’t — and her voice was easy and light and filled the space up entirely, and Yuto followed her through the doorway and let it settle over him.
The hot thing in his chest cooled a degree or two.
Just a degree or two.
He was still simring when he left the house an hour later.
xxxx
Teki’s face stayed with him.
Not the words exactly — words were just air — but the face. The particular expression of soone who has looked at you and found the looking barely worth the effort. The yawn. The way he’d glanced at the room like it didn’t quite qualify as a real place.
Yuto summoned Shiny at the end of the street.
Shiny appeared, fell into step, and said nothing. Within about thirty seconds he had quietly registered that sothing was off — Yuto could feel the slight shift, the way Shiny walked a fraction closer and let his eyes move around the street with a little more care than usual. He didn’t ask about it. He never asked about anything. He just adjusted and kept walking.
Yuto appreciated this about him.
They moved through the market district and turned toward the stalls near the N gate. Yuto walked straight to the weapons stall. He already knew what he wanted — he’d looked at it the day before and done the math and walked away from it. The balanced one. The one that felt like it had actually been made for soone’s hand.
Four silver.
He put the coins down without hesitating.
He held the new sword for a mont and felt the difference. The weight was right. The grip was right. Yesterday he had stood in front of this exact blade and calculated whether he could manage it and decided he couldn’t. Today he just bought it.
Small things.
He secured it alongside the old one, adjusted to the weight of both, and turned toward the gate.
The N gate sat between its stone arches, shimring, radiating the low constant pressure that Yuto was starting to think of as just the gate’s personality. He handed his ticket to the officer — no eye contact, sa as yesterday, sa as he suspected it would be every single day going forward — and stepped through.
The familiar unpleasantness of the transition. The world going sideways for a few seconds.
Then the woodland. The filtered light. The particular sll of the Astral Realm, which he was already beginning to recognise the way you recognise sowhere you’ve been before but don’t fully know yet.
He stood at the treeline.
Failure. Nothing. No version of this makes sense.
He turned the words over. Let himself feel the edges of them. Then he filed them deeper in his mind — not the place where things got forgotten, but the other place. The one that kept a running tally.
He started walking
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